During the last few decades, a wide array of exercise equipment has been made commercially available for home use. The vast majority of this equipment is targeted or designed for healthy people that want to work out to improve or maintain their current health or increase muscle mass. The number of infomercials and other advertising reflects the saturation of this market. The majority of target users for this equipment range from teenagers to healthy sixty year-olds.
The productive use of almost all of this exercise equipment assumes minimal or no physical disability (e.g., paralysis of the arms and/or legs, clumsiness, loss of coordination, etc.). This is a healthy population.
With improvements in healthcare, the average life expectancy is now approximately eighty years old. However, during the course of their now increased lifespan, many of these people experience disease, injury, permanent impairments or disabilities (e.g., strokes; trauma from a motor vehicle accident or fall; work injuries; or degenerative disease of the brain, spinal cord or peripheral nerves) that significantly restrict their physical capabilities. These physical afflictions have several important ramifications. First, these physical impairments or handicaps prevent effective use of the vast majority of exercise equipment. Additionally, people in this population have increasing difficulty with transportation to and from health clubs, gyms and physical therapy facilities. This increasing population is currently underserved by existing exercise equipment.
People use wheelchairs and in some cases become wheelchair dependent for a variety of reasons. A sudden lower body injury from a sporting event or an accident, a debilitating disease or medical condition, and recovery from surgery are just some of the reasons that people use and come to rely upon wheelchairs. Some people, such as those who break one or both legs in a skiing accident, for example, are in the wheelchair for a relatively short period of time while their bodies heal. Others, such as those that receive a spinal cord injury, spend substantially longer time in the wheelchair and may even spend the rest of their lives being wheelchair bound.
One important aspect of life that wheelchair occupants quickly learn to appreciate is that despite the fact that a large portion of the day is spent in the wheelchair in a sitting position, their bodies need to exercise on a regular basis to stay in shape, just like everyone else. Even paraplegics, who lack feeling in their legs, need to tone leg muscles.
Toward this end, several devices have been proposed that allow a person to remain in a wheelchair while performing exercises of all types directly from the wheelchair in order to allow the person to stay in shape. Some such devices, which work with varying degrees of efficiency, tend to be unduly complex in design and relatively expensive to manufacture and thus unaffordable. Other such devices tend to be unduly difficult to set up and use, making the user frustrated and possibly causing the individual to abandon exercising altogether. Still other devices, although relatively simple in design and construction and relatively easy to assemble and use, are limited in that the devices exercise only a small portion of the user's body. The user is required to purchase several different devices and move from device to device in order to achieve a full body workout. While some users may not object to such an arrangement, others will find it a difficult solution due to the purchase costs of several pieces of equipment, and the large storage needs of the several pieces. Furthermore, if the person needs help manipulating the equipment and moving on and off of the exercise devices another person is required to be present during the entire workout.
Therefore, it is an object of the invention to fulfill a need in the art for an apparatus that allows a wheelchair occupant, an ambulatory but impaired person or an unimpaired person to achieve a robust full body workout and which addresses the above stated problems found in the art. It is another object of the invention to provide an apparatus that permits a wheelchair occupant or ambulatory person to perform both aerobic and anaerobic exercises. Still another object of the invention is to provide an exercise apparatus, for wheelchair occupants or ambulatory persons, that is relatively simple in design and construction, can be manufactured inexpensively using standard manufacturing techniques, and is relatively easy to assemble, install and use. The exercise apparatus of the invention preferably provides the user with a large variety of exercises, for the lower body and optionally the upper body, and both aerobic and anaerobic, to allow the user to exercise all desired muscle groups without the need for a large number of devices. Such an apparatus preferably allows the user to switch between exercises without the need for an additional person to be present so as to allow the user the ability to go through an exercise routine unassisted. Ideally, such an apparatus is comfortable and natural for the person to use